iTunes + Microsoft Expression Go Reflective

In a really strange turn of events, both the latest version of iTunes and Microsoft's upcoming Expression studio tools herald new levels of usability. While Steve Jobs trumpeted the arrival and improved ease of use of iTunes 7 at the recent Apple Special Event, Microsoft says the new suite of tools will "enable faster and richer interface development".

While both claims remain to be seen, the one similarity between these two products is they both seem to equate "real-time reflections" as representative of an improved user experience. I wonder if both camps read the same secondary market research stating 'people' really, really liked reflections?!?

Let's look at this from the perspective of a Product Manager responsible for either of these applications. You need to qualify customer demand, seem features that elicit benefit to meet that demand, prioritize those features (and development resources) such that you can deliver against a subset of the most useful and profitable features, and try to allocate at least a modicum of focus on product quality and usability. If this the mind of the Product Manager, why would you ever allocate resources to develop a feature that, at best, "looks cool"?

Think of the overall trade-offs you need to acknowledge to include reflections in your system design. Think of the pre-processor overhead required, the process allocation to render the reflected image in realtime, and the unseen tax this added branch (which will undoubtedly be problematic) will mean from a system quality perspective.

While I'm sure the feature is cool, I'm more certain there were better uses of developer time:

• Microsoft - you could have instead developed a built-in trace feature that track and display user inputs. That would enable application developers to see exactly how the system is being used and how to improve both performance and usability.
• Apple - you could have instead honed the new iconography such that the images used were a better representative of users' mental model.
  

... and that's just of the top of my head ... and I'm more of a Product Marketer than a Product Manager.

Disclosure: I use both iTunes 7 and the beta edition of Expression.